Tom Rogers (SHS '72) Named Chairman Of Ad Tech Company Captify

UPDATE: Forbes got a fact wrong in this story. Although Tom is the Chairman of Captify, Captify is just one of several companies Tom is an Executive Chairman or Chairman of. He oversees a portfolio of companies in the media/tech space. He is not operating from the Captify offices.

Captify, a UK-based adtech company that’s making a splash Stateside with deep-dive search intelligence, will announce Monday that it has named Tom Rogers, the peripatetic media executive, who led TiVo for over a decade and founded CNBC, as its chairman.

Rogers—who as a top NBC executive was key in creating MSNBC, and also ran publisher Primedia—will be based in the Manhattan office that Captify opened in 2016. The group wants to crack the US market, which Captify CEO and co-founder Dominic Joseph calls “a completely different beast than Europe.”

In an interview, the two men said Rogers will apply his industry savvy and impressive rolodex to boostCaptify’s profile with agencies and advertisers. The company already works with some of the biggest, from Apple and Amazon toAmerican Express, Microsoft, Disney, Comcast and Target.

“I’ve gone with Dom to a couple of very senior-level meetings in the tech advertising world to introduce them,” Rogers said, “and the refrain was, ‘How come I didn’t know about this? These people are providing a huge premium to clients.’”

Rogers explains Captify’s value like this — acknowledging first that in the broad advertising world nobody exploits data better than Google. But while the search giant might direct a consumer looking to buy a television to retailer Best Buy, Captify takes it further, capturing a more targeted Best Buy search for, say, Samsung large-screen TVs with certain audio features. “You are really beginning to see what somebody wants. Mining the data gives tremendously greater insight into intention and desires than the macro search data that Google has done,” said Rogers.